Obscene Eyes are a horror of the depths, fortunately rarely seen on the surface or even in “shallow” catacombs. Malevolently intelligent in their mature forms, their spawn are hostile and yet disarmingly unintelligent aquatic predators.

Obscene Eye art by yours truly
(statted out below for B/X Dungeons & Dragons or Labyrinth Lord – sorry about the mangled layout of the creature stat blocks, those will be corrected in the forthcoming PDF edition.)
Obscene Eye, Infant
Armour Class: 8 No. Appearing: 1-6 (2-24)
Hit Dice: 4 Save As: Fighter 2
Move: 30’ (10’) Morale: 11
Swimming: 120’ (40’)
Attacks: 4 Tentacles Treasure Type: Nil
Damage: 1d6 (x4) Alignment: Chaotic
Infant eyes have a eyeball roughly a foot across and four tentacles reaching four to eight feet away from the mouth which is concealed opposite the eyeball. While the mouth is harmless in combat, the infant eyes seemingly exist purely to grab food and potential food, kill it, and then eat it. While they occasionally appear in large numbers, they fortunately lack any of the magical powers of the rest of their kin, as well as their malevolent intelligence.
Obscene eyes often “plant” their young in aquatic environments far from their home turf. This gives them greater access to food while also encouraging the survival of the strongest among them to propagate new obscene eye colonies far and wide across the land.
Obscene Eye, Adult
Armour Class: 5 No. Appearing: 1-4 (1-8)
Hit Dice: 8 Save As: Magic User 8
Move: 90’ (30’) Morale: 9
Swimming: 150’ (50’)
Attacks: 4 Tentacles Treasure Type: D, I
Damage: 1d8 (x4) Alignment: Chaotic
After consuming all they can see for a decade or so, juvenile obscene eyes finally finish growing and become sentient, untapping their magical potential. As an adult, an obscene eye can move by a means of magical levitation as well as by swimming (in an anti-magic environment, they can pull themselves along the ground at a rate of 30’ (10’)). They also become capable of breathing in both air and water.
The adult obscene eye has a paralyzing cone magical attack that comes from their eyeball. Anyone in the 30’ wide cone, 60’ long, must make a saving throw versus paralysis or be paralyzed the next round. Typically a group of adults will open by paralyzing the party and then attacking those who can no longer defend themselves.
Any creature struck by a tentacle attack becomes wrapped in the tentacle, suffering a -1 per tentacle on his own attack rolls and the obscene eye no longer needs to roll to hit with that tentacle.
Obscene Eye, Elder
Armour Class: 2 No. Appearing: 1-6 (2-24)
Hit Dice: 12 Save As: Magic User 12
Move: 60’ (20’) Morale: 10
Swimming: 90’ (30’)
Attacks: 4 Tentacles Treasure Type: D, I (x2)
Damage: 1d12 (x4) Alignment: Chaotic
Elder obscene eyes are identical to adults, albeit slower. Their paralyzing gaze lasts for 1d6 rounds, and they can charge their tentacles with electricity once per hour, granting all their tentacle attacks 1d8 electricity damage in addition to the normal damage for 1d6 rounds.
Classic old school design. But what do they want? You say they are intelligent, can they communicate with others? With their own kind?
They want to be the alpha creatures in your next dungeon.
I seem to have omitted the section on comunication. (yeah, that’s my excuse!) The mature ones can communicate with each other telepathically to a range of 1,000 feet, and some elders (20% or so) can do so with other races as well.
Can the adults telepathically control the young? That would allow for some interesting tactics.
Entirely up to the DM. Like most old-school critters, ecology, deployment and both strategic and tactical choices depend on the storyline and what role they are filling.
Most twistedly cool
Very nice, I’m a great advocate for obscenity. Am I to infer that for the Adult Eye, if the PC makes the save vs paralysis the first round it doesn’t have to keep making it (in contrast to the Elder Eye)?
I guess that could be clearer, eh?
The paralyzing eyeblasts are an attack, so if the obscene eye does that, it can’t also attack with its tentacles.
If the eye offends the… 😉
Cool creature.
PDF, please! : )
PDF will be out in January. I’m putting together “Dyson’s Dodecahedron”, a 12-page digest-format PDF of stuff from the blog formatted for easy and pretty printing
Very nice — I look forward to it. Thanks!
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